ecoculture, geophilosophy, mediapolitics

A 7-year musical itch

One of my pet musicological theories is that the years 1967-74 were the most creative 7-year period in the history of musical humanity.

Why those years? The social and technological revolutions of the 1960s — civil rights, the women’s movement, the counterculture and anti-Vietnam War movements, the sudden unifying singularity of television and mass (and alternative) media across national boundaries — made possible new convergences across a wide range of cultural spheres, including among musicians coming out of the rock, folk, jazz, blues, classical, and avant-garde traditions, not to mention interlocutors from India, Africa, South America, and elsewhere.

Albums like Sgt. Pepper’s and festivals like Isle of Wight became crossing points for new, experimental conduits of musical creativity. And while Woodstock (or Altamont), the deaths of MLK and Robert Kennedy, and the visible decline of the counterculture at the end of the 1960s are often taken as a denouement rather than a new beginning, with the early to mid 1970s indicating a certain washing out of the radical creativity of preceding years, in music I believe that creativity became funneled into more strictly musical forms. Culturally or politically this might seem, in retrospect, as a kind of backpedaling, and there is no doubt that 1968 was a political high point that, for those involved in it, cast its shadow on years to come. But I think it’s precisely that fecund shadow that expressed itself musically over the years that followed.

In the worlds of rock and pop, for instance, one could start with the Beatles, the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa and the Mothers, the Grateful Dead, Sly and the Family Stone, Parliament/Funkadelic, the prog and space and glam rockers at their best (a necessary qualification), sundry movements around the world (British folk-rock, Brazilian Tropicalia, German “Krautrock,” Jamaican reggae and dub, Afro-rock’s various styles), and the nascent elements that were to become punk, the musically more interesting post-punk of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the burgeoning dance musics of the time. Some of these incorporated influences from jazz, African music, Indian and other Asian musics, and some or many of these were blended more directly into the experiments of psychedelic bands, Miles Davis, the AACM scene in Chicago, and others.

Here are just a handful of cases in point…

Not long after Bob Dylan had retreated with members of (the not yet named) The Band to stew up the strange “invisible republic” of The Basement Tapes, which Greil Marcus famously interpreted as “The Old, Weird America,” Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart) was brewing up the more surreal mix of Delta blues and swamp rock, avant-garde and free jazz, backwoods hollerin’ and socially and ecologically inflected Americana that constituted Trout Mask Replica (1969) and Lick My Decals Off, Baby (1970).

Here’s his Magic Band as captured on German TV in 1972:

Also in Germany, the vibrant “Krautrock” scene, as the British press came to call it, featured bands like the wildly experimental groups Faust, Amon Düül II, and Can. Here’s a fragment of the early Can, made up of students (directly) of experimental composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and (indirectly) of the Velvet Underground, Beefheart, Miles Davis, funk and soul:

In the jazz world, radical innovators like Miles Davis and his perpetually evolving entourage — many of whom were to become leaders of the jazz world (or fusion, or something) for years to come — pushed the boundaries across any lines separating jazz from funk, psychedelic rock, and avant-garde improvisation.

And growing out of the experimental jazz milieu in Chicago, this heady fusion of Africana and Black Americana:

Somewhere on the French fringes of rock, jazz, Wagnerian (and Orffian) classical, and the minimalism of Reich, Glass, Riley, et al., Christian Vander’s Magma began creating one of the strangest hybrids the world has seen. Inspired by a disturbing “vision of humanity’s spiritual and ecological future,” Vander decided to create something the likes of which the world hadn’t heard before (and invented a language, Kobaian, to go with it).

While this video comes from a live concert performed almost a quarter-century after it was first written and recorded, the energy sounds as utterly fresh as ever. If you only have 15 minutes to live, start at around 9’45.” (Note that the original link has gone dead; I’ve substituted another for what I believe is the same concert, Le Trianon in 2000.)

And at the intersections of Anglo-Celtic and world folk traditions, rock, and countercultural psychedelia, we find such rich experimental interweavings as this one:

More than any other folk-rock (or folk-anything) fusion work, Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter distills the immanent eco-cosmic spirituality of the back-to-the-land movement into a profound lyrical-musical tapestry that would quietly feed generations of psych-folk musicians to come (and reportedly push Led Zeppelin into more interesting directions). For a sample, start with “The Water Song” at 32’00” and continue through to the end.

I could go on (and probably will).

Why claim something special for that 7-year-period and not for any similarly bracketed period since (or before) then? There’s nothing particularly magical about the number seven, at least as far as revolutions around the sun go. It could just as well be eight (1967-75), and such an exercise is, at any rate, always a matter of selective interpretation.

And why end it in 1974? Somehow the number of convergent socio-political events — the Opec oil crisis, the Chilean coup, Watergate, the end of the Vietnam War, et al. (all roughly 1973-74) — seems paralleled by the winding down of so many of the musical developments mentioned above, from the complete withdrawal of Miles Davis (with his “retirement” in 1975) to the aesthetic demise of so many of the experimental and genuinely “progressive” rock bands of the time (the Soft Machine, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Beefheart’s Magic Band, and on and on).

I certainly don’t deny that important new developments have happened since, or that the music industry has diversified significantly in the past 25 years. In the 1980s, rock and pop were dominated by a handful of huge corporations; today that oligopoly has arguably been broken, and it’s possible to access music from anywhere and anytime (including from that 7-year period) much more readily than it has been at anytime in the past. All of that has multiplied the range of musical creativity around the world.

And yet, I don’t think that creativity has ever been as concentrated and focused as it was in the 7-or-8-year-period following 1967.

I haven’t thought through the details of this argument yet, but there it is. Its relevance for ecocriticism is no more evident than for anything else. But an ecocritical perspective that focuses on the multiple — material, perceptual, and social — ecologies of creativity and their capacities for reworking the relationship between humans and Earth must start with moments of cultural change and the “virtualities” they embody.

This same 7-year period saw an efflorescence of environmental and eco-philosophical creativity that has hardly been matched since: from the first Whole Earth Catalog and Earthrise, Lynn White’s famous argument about religion and the eco-crisis, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 (all 1968), to the beginnings of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth (both circa 1969), Earth Day (1970) and the passage U.S. National Environmental Protection Act later that year, and pop-cultural phenomena like Dr. Suess’s The Lorax (1971), Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On” (1971) with its eco-anthem, “Mercy Mercy Me,” and films like Silent Running (1972) and Soylent Green (1973). The shifts triggered then and reverberating since — with the rise, for instance, of Green parties — are, in some sense, related to, or at least paralleled by, the affects unleashed by musical hybridization across genres and experiential registers.

All of that has been considered by others in relation to social movements, but rarely specifically in relation to ecology and environmentalism, except in fragments. (As he did with ecology and film, David Ingram took the lead in that direction with his Jukebox in the Garden.) As ecomusicology grows, so, I hope, will its theoretical and empirical scope to encompass larger theories of musical and cultural change that could account for germinal periods of change (like 1967-74) that rearrange and break open the possibilities for everything that follows.

5 Responses

This kind of thing is a frequently fun exercise in airing the things that “have that feeling” for and want the rest of the world to share, or at least argue about, as another way of experiencing them. So in that spirit, I agree with you about the time frame for rock and rock-ish music, maybe international music, but not jazz. Give or take several months on each side, 1959 is THE year for jazz.

“Kind of Blue”, “Giant Steps” “Ah Um” “The Shape of Things To Come” “Time Out” as albums make the case for this alone, but also each of these albums are also defining moments both in the individual artist’s music, and in the evolution of the form itself.

This is the moment jazz embraces pushing the boundaries fully. This is the crucible leading to the jazz of the time period you discuss.

Bob – You make a good point. It’s worth distinguishing here between intra-generic developments (i.e., within a specific genre, such as jazz) and inter– or trans-generic developments (which is what I was thinking about). For jazz itself you may be quite right. Within rock, and even between rock, folk, and some other forms of popular music, the relevant time period might be the early and mid 1960s.

But each of these branches out into more wildly and trans-generically experimental forms somewhat later: e.g., the “free” jazz of Ornette, the later Coltrane, and others less bound up with jazz (though that began in the late 1950s); the tape experiments of the Beatles (and others influenced by musique concrete) and the use of the studio as a compositional tool, e.g., by Teo Macero on Bitches Brew, the Grateful Dead on Anthem of the Sun, and others; the emergence of the concept album; etc.

I agree that this is all a fun exercise… And a way of testing out ideas that need more thought.

I love this rock band. Many incredible concerts and tours throughout America. How many people gathered for concerts in Vegas. See more events on the site https://best-vegas.com/. Thanks for the nostalgia.